[ The Jewish community is now with a profound moral challenge.
Even as we mourns our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest
the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no
uncertain terms.]
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SEEKING UNDERSTANDING AMIDST THE HORROR IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE  
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Rabbi Brant Rosen
October 12, 2023
Shalom Rav
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_ The Jewish community is now with a profound moral challenge. Even
as we mourns our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the
genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no
uncertain terms. _

Artwork used by Italian Network for Peace and Disarmament,

 

When I heard the initial reports of Hamas’ attacks on Israel this
past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was
“good for them.” Israel had been collectively punishing
Palestinians in Gaza for years with a crushing blockade with little to
no care from the rest of the world. Now, amazingly, Palestinians had
broken free from this seemingly impenetrable open-air prison. With
power and ingenuity, they were resisting their oppression, reminding
Israel – and the world at large – that they were still here. That
they would not submit.

Inevitably, as the news of the attacks trickled in during the course
of the day, my emotions turned to shock and grief. Along with the rest
of the world, I learned about the sheer scale of violence committed by
Hamas militants against Israeli civilians: the largest single day
massacre in Israeli history. At last count, at least
[[link removed].] 1,200
Israelis have been killed and it is estimated that 150 have been
abducted and taken hostage into Gaza. Everyone in Israel and many Jews
throughout the world, know people – or know of people – who were
killed, injured or taken hostage. Like so many in the Jewish
community, my social media feed has been filled with heartbreaking
pictures and stories of Israelis who have been slain or are still
unaccounted for.

Amidst all the grief, however, I was also deeply troubled by the
ominous, growing cries for vengeance voiced by the Israeli government
and media, and felt a creeping dread over the shattering military
response that would almost certainly rain down on the people of Gaza.
And now that day has come. Israel has shut off all electricity and
water for over two million Palestinians as the military wreaks
complete and total devastation on across that tiny strip, attacking
hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment
buildings.  As of this writing, the death toll
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risen to more than 1,200, with 5,600 wounded. More than 250,000
people
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been rendered homeless – and these numbers will almost certainly
rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.

In a letter to my congregation a few days ago, I wrote that “so many
of us are feeling layers upon layers of intense emotion, in often
confusing and contradictory ways. For Jews who stand in solidarity
with Palestinians, I know these confusing contradictions are
particularly keen.” Even so, I wrote, we simply _must_ lift up the
underlying context of this horrible violence. I continue to hold
tightly to this conviction. While the sheer scope of our grief may
feel incomprehensible, we simply must find the wherewithal to say out
loud that the facts of these events have not only been comprehensible,
but in fact inevitable.

Indeed, Palestinians and their allies have long been sounding the
alarm that Israel was subjecting Palestinians to a brutally violent
apartheid regime against Palestinians with impunity – and there
would be terrible consequences if the international community failed
to intervene. Over and over, we’ve been warned about the cataclysmic
violence that would inevitably ensue if Israel was not held to
account. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it
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“an entire people (has been) living under this kind of incredible
oppression, in a pressure cooker. It had to explode.”

As we attempt to understand the context of this recent violence, I
believe it’s utterly critical to know where to plot the starting
point – and to my mind, this is precisely where most of the media
analyses of the past several days have sadly gone astray. To judge by
any number of pundits, this current outbreak of violence began
alternatively with the US – Saudi deal or the policies of the
far-right Netanyahu administration. While it might be said that any of
these causes may have provided the most recent spark, I’ve been
deeply disappointed, if not surprised, that precious few of these
analyses have even mentioned _the Nakba_ in relation to this latest
outbreak of violence.

To be sure, the Nakba
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an act of violence and harm that has been reverberating through the
land between the river and the sea from 1948 until this very day. To
put it simply, for the past 75 years, Israel has been violently
dispossessing Palestinians in order to make way for a majority Jewish
state. And for just as long, the Palestinian people have been
resisting their dispossession – yes, often violently.

It is not by chance that this most recent violence has occurred in and
around Gaza. As many commentators have observed
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in many ways been the epicenter of the Nakba – and of the
Palestinian people’s resistance to it. To grasp this fully, it is
important to understand the history of this region. Gaza’s narrative
did not begin with Israel’s blockade or the political ascension of
Hamas. What we call today the “Gaza Strip” was artificially
created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of ethnically
cleansed Palestinian refugees from cities and villages in the coastal
plain and lower Galilee. Before the Nakba, the population of this
small region numbered 60 to 80,000 residents. By the end of the
hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into this 140
square mile strip of land.

At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home –
some could even see their towns and villages through the fences. Those
who crossed the border to gather their possessions or harvest their
crops were considered “infiltrators” by Israel and shot on sight.
Eventually, it became all too clear there would be no return. Over the
years the tents turned into concrete buildings that grew ever higher
along that narrow corridor. The numbers of that once sparse territory
have grown to a population today of over 2,000,000 people – at least
70% of whom are refugees.

Following the founding of the state of Israel, many of the original
settlements and kibbutzim founded on the border with Gaza were
military outposts, most of which were built on top of or near
demolished Palestinian villages. In fact, the sites that suffered the
brunt of last Saturday’s massacres (including Kibbutz Kfar Aza
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were settlements that were originally established in these locations
for reasons of Israeli “national security.”

One such site was Kibbutz Nahal Oz
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which was flooded by dozens of Hamas militants, and where, according
to witnesses, at least two entire families were killed, and two more
kidnapped and taken to Gaza as hostages. When I heard about the
massacre at Nahal Oz, I couldn’t help but recall that this was not
the first time this community had experienced Palestinian armed
resistance. Back in 1956, a group of Palestinian militants entered
Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. At the time,
this tragedy was keenly felt throughout the nascent state of Israel.
At Roi’s funeral, the famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan offered a
eulogy, expressing himself with brutal and unexpected honesty:

Do not today besmirch the murderers with accusations. Who are we that
we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they sit
in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for
ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they
and their fathers dwelled…This we know: that in order that the hope
to destroy us should die we have to be armed and ready, morning and
night. We are a generation of settlement, and without a steel helmet
and the barrel of a cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house.
Our children will not live if we do not build shelters, and without a
barbed wire fence and a machine gun we cannot pave a road and channel
water. The millions of Jews that were destroyed because they did not
have a land look at us from the ashes _of Israelite history and
command us to take possession of and establish a land for our nation._

Dayan’s words resonate today with terrible prescience. Decades
later, the descendants of this original Gazan generation still remain
in refugee camps in Gaza, “gazing though the barrier fences as
Israel appropriates as its own portion the land and the villages in
which their ancestors dwelled.” Dayan’s eulogy also powerfully
described a hypervigilant Israeli mindset that has only deepened
throughout the decades. Since the Nakba could not and did not result
in the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes,
Israel has attempted to control them with a “steel helmet and the
barrel of a cannon” for the past 75 years. During this time, Israel
has widened its regime of violence in order to contain Palestinians in
the occupied territories, subjecting them to a daily context of
systemic, unceasing state violence every moment of their lives.

It is also telling that Dayan invoked the trauma of the Holocaust in
his eulogy – and today, so many decades later, we can clearly see
that this trauma was not limited to his generation alone. If anything,
it has been handed down to subsequent generations in way that are all
too real and all too palpable. Indeed, we can clearly see this
generational trauma at work in Jewish responses to this latest
violence, which is being openly characterized
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“the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.” It is
painfully poignant to consider that these massacres occurred in a
state that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to
safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.

At the same time, however, this Holocaust rhetoric is deeply troubling
given the vengeful fury currently being whipped up by a far-right
Israeli government that is demonizing Palestinians with unabashedly
genocidal language. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently
stated
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is fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly.”
Netanyahu has promised
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Israel’s military offensive on Gaza will “reverberate for
generations.” One prominent Israeli general has promised
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“open the gates of hell.” And perhaps most chillingly, a member of
Israeli Parliament has called for
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“second Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”

As I write these words, the Israeli military is mercilessly bombarding
the Gaza Strip with a ferocity that is truly terrifying to behold. For
the past few days, I’ve been combing social media for their postings
from friends in Gaza, as I helplessly watch footage of whole
neighborhoods and communities completely destroyed along with their
inhabitants. One of the last messages I read came from a friend and
former colleague at American Friends Service Committee: “Nothing
left to say. More than 80 hours without electricity, water, or
internet connection. Communication is very limited with everyone
inside or outside Gaza. Carnage everywhere, hard to recognize streets,
we are all waiting for the time to die.”

It is not an understatement to suggest that the Jewish community is
now faced with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourn our dead
in Israel, we _must_ acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is
currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms. I cannot
say this forcefully enough: those of us who ignore this reality –
who mourn the Jewish dead exclusively without even a mention of the
massive crimes Israel is actively committing against the Palestinian
people – will be quite frankly, complicit in this horrific
bloodshed.

Over the past several days, I’ve found myself returning to a famous
narrative from this week’s Torah portion: the story of Cain and
Abel. In the wake of the first act of violence in human history, God
says to Cain, “What have you done? The blood of your brother is
crying out to me from the ground! Cursed by the ground that opened its
mouth to receive the blood of your brother.”  From this we learn,
among other things, that bloodshed actually has the power to pollute
the earth. Later on in the Torah, we will learn that nothing can ever
be the same – or considered normal again – when blood is spilled.
it must be expiated, or atoned for through a set of very complex and
explicit sacrificial rituals. In our day, we can understand these to
be acts of reparation, restoration and repatriation. We will only
truly make atonement for this bloodshed with very real measures that
will restore justice and balance for those who dwell in the land. 

As I read this story, I can’t help but think of the blood originally
shed in the terrible days of the Nakba, and how it continues to cry
out to us all from the ground. I can’t help but think of the immense
of blood that has been shed since, whose collective cry must certainly
be a searing roar, if only we would allow ourselves to heed it. But we
will never hear the cry as along as we remain hardened into sides,
into “us and them,” no people’s blood is any redder or more
precious than any others. In fact, in this week’s Torah portion,
there are no “sides” to speak of. There are no nations, no
Israelites, no Canaanites, no Amalekites, no Moabites. There is only
one common humanity, struggling how to live together in a too often
harsh and unyielding world.

Those it may seem more painfully difficult than ever, let us hearken
to this voices that have so long been crying out from the ground. Let
us respond with understanding, compassion and action. Even amidst the
terrible grief, let us shine an unflinching light on the true roots of
this violence – and on the vision of a future based on justice and
equality for all who live in the land.

With this in mind, I will conclude now with the prayerful words
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my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Alissa Wise:

May the One Who Remembers allow us to hold in one hand 75 years of
occupation,
dispossession and violence and in the other a future of peace, justice
and freedom;

May the One Who is Slow to Anger soften our hearts and our fists
helping us to put down the sword even at the height of the arc of our
rage;

May the One of Possibility remind us that a future of peace with
justice is possible;

May the One Who Awakens Us to Life hold us in our pain and
vindictiveness until we set those down for the sake of life;

May the One Who Endures allow us to act for the sake of the coming
generations;

May the One Who is Without Limit expand our senses of what is possible
as we reach for justice, freedom and peace for us all.

Amen.

_[RABBI BRANDT ROSEN is the founding rabbi of I’m the rabbi of
Tzedek Chicago [[link removed]]. He is a
native of Los Angeles, Rabbi Brant was ordained by the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1992 and served congregations
in Los Angeles and Denver before coming to the Chicago area in 1998 to
serve as rabbi of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation (JRC)._

_During the course of his rabbinate, Rabbi Brant became an
increasingly vocal activist for justice and human rights, particularly
in Israel/Palestine. After publicly wrestling with his relationship to
Israel and openly questioning his lifelong Zionism, he eventually
became a prominent Jewish presence in the Palestine solidarity
movement, co-founding the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council
and Ta'anit Tzedek - Jewish Fast for Gaza._

_In 2014, he left JRC to become the Midwest Regional Director of the
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Shortly after, Rabbi Brant
and several other kindred spirits founded Tzedek Chicago. Through his
leadership, our congregation quickly grew to the point that by 2019,
he became our full-time rabbi._

_Rabbi Brant's writings have appeared in many journals and
publications, including Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the Jewish
Forward, Tikkun and Truthout. He is also the author of the popular
Jewish social justice blog, Shalom Rav; his curated collection of blog
posts and reader comments, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path
to Palestinian Solidarity
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was published by Just World Books in 2012 (updated in 2017)._

_Rabbi Brant has contributed essays to a number of anthologies
including "Zionism and the Quest for Peace in the Holy Land," "On
Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice," and
"Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation."
He is also a prolific poet and liturgist whose prayers and poems can
be found on his blog Yedid Nefesh. In 2018, Tzedek Chicago published
his chapbook of prayers, "Songs After the Revolution: New Jewish
Liturgy."  In 2020, he was named as a Topol Fellow in Conflict and
Peace in the Religion, Conflict and Public Life Institute at Harvard
Divinity School.]_

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Hamas
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* Palestinians
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Gaza City
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* Nabka
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* Jewish community
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* apartheid
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* Genocide
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* Holocaust
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* The Holocaust
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* Human Rights
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* Judaism
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* peace
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* refugees
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* zionism
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* war
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